There is a joke that says: adulthood is thinking “next week will be less busy” until you die. It’s funny because it’s true — but it’s also quite sad. And it’s not only about work, because life gets in the way in many other ways.

I’m not going to go into details, but the last few months have been a rollercoaster as a close family member has been dealing with a medical situation. It involved a lot of driving, seeing multiple doctors, a one-week stay away from home while a complicated surgery was performed; and amidst all that, all the practicalities of day-to-day life with the constant background of the pain and issues that comes from them. I even stopped posting on social media, something that (perhaps not surprisingly, but that’s another story) most people didn’t even notice.

At every step along the way, I kept telling myself: I’ll start writing again when this next milestone is reached and I can breathe. Yet no milestone ever coincided with being done, quite the opposite. Suffice it to say that the surgery solved one problem, but opened up a whole new Pandora’s box. We’re now looking at weeks, or likely months, of more appointments with doctors, therapies, and whatnot. And of course, other things in life don’t stop. I still have to work, buy groceries, walk the dog, and handle everything else as it comes along.

As I bookmarked the millionth webpage I will never have time to properly read through, I realized one thing that should have been obvious all along: the perfect conditions may just never come together. Let’s be realistic: all these family issues aside, it’s extremely unlikely that every single piece of the puzzle of life will fall into place at the same time. And even if it did, it probably wouldn’t last long enough for me to be able to write all I have in my mind, or take all the photos I have planned, or whatever it is that I eventually want to do.

It seems clear in hindsight, even trivial. But it’s one of those things that’s easy to lose track of. Chalk it up to my being a perfectionist, maybe, or to an innate (and pointless) sense of guilt whenever I do something I enjoy. Even then, though, I know that I’m not ignoring what ought to be done for others, nor am I putting pleasure before duty. So if I do enjoy myself in a rare moment of downtime, where’s the harm? Besides, who knows how things will be in the future? We tell ourselves that next week will be less busy, but it never is. By extension, I may only have a little time for myself now, but at least I do have that little time. Why postpone enjoyable things indefinitely, if it doesn’t harm anyone and doesn’t distract me from what I’m supposed to be doing?

Furthermore, and I’m perfectly aware that this is a little morbid and fatalistic but bear with me here, who knows what the future will bring. These last few months have really gotten me thinking about how little time we have in general. It’s another cliché, of course it is. But the thing about clichés is that they are true, and sometimes you need to figure them out for yourself.

I’ve always been one who saves up, be it money in the bank, ammo in a video game, or projects to work on. Saving up, at every turn, because it’s better to have it for later if you don’t need it now. It’s a good approach and it’s served me well in times of emergency. But I’ve also denied myself many things and experiences in the name of “this is not the right time”. Yet, how do I know when the right time is? There’s no discrete amount of rightness, rather an infinite spectrum. And you get used to it, so it’s harder and harder to let go and loosen up.

I sometimes joke that “at any rate I have to die” when I do something somewhat hedonistic, whether that’s eating another chocolate croissant or buying a drone. It’s a joke, but lately I’ve been giving it some serious thought. I don’t mean this to be creepy, but then again it’s my stream of consciousness, so who cares? The point is: it’s exactly like that, at any rate I have to die. Again, it’s a cliché, but it’s a whole different experience when you reach that conclusion independently, instead of just reading it on a motivational poster.

I do have a finite number of days left in my life. I did start dying the moment I was born. Those are facts, and they apply to everyone, like it or not. Now I do not dwell in the delusion that I’ll accomplish something great that will change the course of humanity, nor that my own life is special to others in any way. But it is true that I only have so many moments to do something I enjoy, or something good, ideally both. It’s not even a matter of “I just wanna live while I’m alive” (Bon Jovi), because “there [are] worse things than dying” (Eric Bogle).

I’ve wasted many useful moments so far, and have no doubt, I will be wasting many more. Dealing for many years with certain things I don’t want to talk about is part of the reason, and I’m working on that. But my congenital sense of guilt? Well, I’m working on getting rid of it entirely. I may not be popular with others, and that’s fine. I just need to be popular with myself. I’m the one who’s always with myself (Max Pezzali), and I’m the one who needs to take care of myself. That means also taking the time to do something for myself, whether it’s writing, or taking photos, or recording a podcast. Even if time is limited, even if I can’t do it as well as I wish. A little is a slightly better than nothing, better than waiting for the perfect time, and much better than regretting the wait.

I look back at the things I was doing a few years ago, and I feel like I slowly lost track of those creative endeavors. Life got in the way, that’s for sure, but I also progressively distanced myself from them, as if growing up — or perhaps growing old — meant sacrificing myself in the name of some greater good. “I’ll do them when things get better” is a honest-to-god approach, but it also ultimately leads to nothing. And I can’t afford to lose myself even more.

I want to write, take pictures, record podcasts, try painting, make a movie, hack machines, create things. Not to be popular or famous, or god forbid rich; rather, just because I enjoy doing those things. And that’s all the reason I need, really, especially as I become more and more aware that time may be infinite in the universe, but is extremely scarce for a person.

So here’s the plan. I’m making no commitments, because life can and will get in the way. I’m not even giving myself a tentative schedule. But I’ll try to at least start writing more often, and hopefully post whatever I write on here. They may my thoughts and streams of consciousness, rather than “articles” or something useful. They may be rants. They may be politically incorrect and extremely biased. I don’t know and, to be completely honest, I don’t even care. Nor do I care whether one or a million people will read them, or even nobody. That’s not the reason I’m doing it. I also want to start picking up my photography again and doing a million other things I’ve put on hold until now, but that’s a whole different story.

And if the end result is not perfect, then who cares? I’ll try again and fail better: “I know the streets are cruel, but I’ll enjoy the ride today.” (Dream Theater)

However, ever since the introduction of cheap compact cameras (and, god forbid, cheap reflex cameras), photography became mainstream. There is nothing inherently wrong with it – the more the merrier, right? – yet there are some trends in photography that I simply do not understand, and some that are just plain bad. Needless to say, these annoyances are most often perpetrated by hipsters or (gasp!) wannabe hipsters. Now, it has to be clarified that my concept of hipster includes not just the traditional, American-ish hipster, but more generally all those “subcultures” – trust me, quotes were never more appropriate – that strive to be alternative and ultimately fail to be unique. This includes, admittedly due to my cultural vantage point, the decadent leit-motif that seems to permeate the life of Italian teenage girls and young women. I may write specifically about this matter, as it’s not specific to photography.

So, without further ado, let me present a roundup of the most annoying trends in photography today. It goes without saying that this is merely my personal opinion.

Straight out of camera (SOOC)

Try running a search for SOOC on Flickr. At the time of writing, it yields over 500,000 results. Are the all ugly pictures? No, not at all. That would be most unfair to say. However, I just do not understand why anyone would want to show off that the picture was entirely unedited, as if it were demanding credit for their ability.

While I can guess their reasoning – “I don’t need to photoshop my photos to make them look good” – it comes with a side effect that apparently they fail to see: it’s like saying “I have a good camera”; but my point is: you just purchased that camera and lens, you didn’t engineer it. You have nothing to brag about.

I am not deliberately bashing SOOC-ists here, for many years ago I used to think that post-production was evil too. I tried to get the best out of my then compact cameras, and it did pay off in the end, because it made me learn many things about imaging systems and optics that I probably would have never cared about if I had just run to tweak the levels to compensate for horrid exposure choices.

I love reflex

This is somewhat linked to the equipment show-off of SOOC-ists. With the ever dropping prices of digital single lens reflex cameras, or dSLR for short, more and more people are purchasing them. Again, this is not inherently bad: I have a dSLR too. My gripe is that these people get a cheap camera – before anybody complains: mine is a cheap camera too, and it’s over six years old – and think they are the artistic heir of Ansel Adams, Annie Leibovitz or, for the most decadent of the group, Diane Arbus.

It’s simply ridiculous. A reflex camera doesn’t make you a true photographer any more than standing in a bike shed makes you a bicycle. Moreover, most of these new artists only ever use the infamous 18-55 mm kit lens, simply because they have absolutely no idea what focal length or aperture is. They also shoot in auto mode, only venturing towards traditional priority modes when they are bored and start wondering what they are, but fail to grasp the mathematical correlation between variables they are simply unaware of. Manual mode appears complicated to a few of them; to the others, the random results raise a silent doubt that their toy may be broken.

Of course, this is often not a concern as the camera is usually paid for by parents. If they were purchased by the photographers themselves, there would at least be more knowledge of how they work. We all tend to make the best out of what we worked hard to afford.

The Seventies are the new sepia

It is said that one can tell when a generation reaches its failure point when its members start being nostalgic about an epoch they never lived. If that’s true, we’re doomed.

Instagram may be seen as some as a refreshing novelty, but the truth is that it’s so overdone and artificial that it’s long gotten out of hand. It takes more than a “pretty” old-style filter to turn the picture of a teacup into a piece of art, yet more and more people are willing to pay for the thrill of sharing the same uniqueness as a few million other people. And just like sepia, all of these photos look dull.

Moreover, what makes more sense than spending hundreds of euros or dollars on a camera or smartphone and topping up a few more coins on an app like that, in order to simulate old and/or broken equipment? But wait, it gets better: here comes…

“Analog” is the way to go

We just don’t get it, they tell us: how can we not understand how much more beautiful analog photos are? And indeed, I cannot understand what that’s even supposed to mean. This irks me on more than one level, because it borders with linguistics.

First of all, I think that calling it “analog” is incorrect. While film certainly is a continuous system rather than a discrete one, I find it surprising that the same wannabe artists who claim to have found the holy grail that finally lets them express themselves will reduce it to a matter of analog vs. digital. What makes “analog” photography so much better, according to them? Film. So why not call it “film photography?” It also sounds more poetic.

Indeed, film has a much wider exposure latitude – and, consequently dynamic range – than even the best digital imaging sensor, or at least negative film does; slides are another story. But do they know any of this? Most of the “analog” photos touted by these people are improperly exposed (admittedly, quite a feat with negative film!), developed and printed by cheap automated minilabs, and digitized at low resolution using scanners that are little more than toys. What’s the point of all of this?

Again, the problem here is that these photographers are oftentimes just teenagers who are not paying for their hobby out of their own pocket. One of the reasons most photographers I know – myself included, obviously – shoot digital is that it’s much more cost-effective. You buy the camera, the lenses, the accessories, the memory cards and you’re good to go for a few years. And you get much more mileage, waste zero cents on tossed pictures, retain detailed information on each shot (EXIF was an invaluable tool to me when I was learning the theory of photography.) Conversely, “analog” photography requires you to buy film beforehand, spend time loading it up, only offers at most 36 pictures per roll – though you can stretch that to 37 or 38 if your camera has a good winding system – and you have to pay to have it developed and printed, then you have to scan it back to post it online. All of this takes time and leaves you at the mercy of the minilab.

Now, I want to point out something important here. I am not bashing film photography at all. Once a year or so I whimsically get a roll of film and take out my father’s Pentax ME Super for a ride; I even bought two more lenses for it a few years back. But I am simply not going to ever claim that digital is fake, because I simply cannot afford to work with film all the time and even if I could, I wouldn’t. The kind of photography I do is often impulsive, in a “seize the moment” style; for that, and especially for macrophotography, I need to be able to take a long stream of pictures in a short period of time, and see results immediately. And I need the highest quality I can get, which means 16-bit RAW files. Even for those with lower requirements, it makes absolutely no sense to use a medium that theoretically provides better results (negative film) and have it crippled by mediocre development and printing services and hideous scanners, especially as negatives are unique, whereas files can be duplicated, restored and worked on all over again as many times as needed.

Still, I know some fellow photographers who know how to deal with negative film, understand its strengths and shortcomings, and either develop and print them on their own, or go to (expensive) labs where the procedure is supervised by people who know what they’re doing. They also use film specifically for what they need – this wonderful dusk landscape by my friend Daniele Faieta was shot on the highly praised Velvia 50, craftfully using its ability to record warm light to obtain such cozy mood – and at times even doing unconventional things such as overexposing and underdeveloping.

But promoting “analog” at all costs gets even worse…

Lomography, or the art of randomness

I just don’t understand lomography. I just don’t. It makes no sense to me. For those who don’t know, Lomography is a “global community” (though it’s actually a trademark by Lomographische AG) whose motto is “Don’t think, just shoot” and promotes “ten golden rules” about how to do it. It’s the ultimate hipster manifesto. Be fast, try the shot from the hip, you don’t have to know what’s in the frame before you shoot, and the unmissable one: don’t worry about rules. Sounds fun, right? I guess it is. We all experiment with our cameras, especially digital ones: it’s free, fun, and delivers immediate satisfaction.

The problem is that this is done on film cameras – sorry, “analog” cameras – with two peculiar details: first of all, it doesn’t use 135 film (the typical little rolls we all know and love), but 120 or 220 film (the kind used in Medium Format cameras), which is somewhat more expensive and difficult to find, and possibly more expensive to develop because minilabs don’t normally work with them. But the most amazing thing about this whole thing is that the camera are deliberately defective: the build quality is poor, they have low-quality plastic lenses that create heavy vignetting and aberrations of all kinds, the bodies leak light. The shutter is often mechanic and its speed fixed, the aperture cannot be changed, and all of this is compensated by on-camera flashes, though it generally falls short of providing even illumination. This is because the “original” Russian-made LOMO camera, the LC-A, was pretty much like that (but without a built-in flash), but western clones are definitely more expensive. It’s an enormous, worldwide niche market.

The results are pretty much horrid, yet followers of this movement swear that it’s what photography should truly be like, because it’s instinctive. It is not just the looks they go after – admittedly, in some (rare) cases lomo-like effects can be a nice addition to a properly taken picture – but also and especially the experience. That’s exactly what Instagram is about, and we have come full circle.

Yet, I can’t help but wonder: what would Ansel Adams think of this? He who walked miles across mountains with thirty pounds worth of equipment together with a burro that carried another hundred, and needed half an hour just to set his glass plate 6-1/2 x 8-1/2 camera up? His shutter was a piece of wood he physically removed to let the light reach the plate. Oh, how the concept of “artist” changes…

The best case scenario is that you have a very recent backup. The worst case scenario is that you don’t have any backup, and you lose valuable data, from either an emotional or professional point of view. Often, from both. This usually leads to nervous breakdowns, extensive cursing, going through a list of past, present and future deities to blame, and possibly weeping. I’ve done all of that, and I’m not ashamed of admitting so.

I have since taken on a “handmade” backup strategy. Time Machine takes care of the main system (minus a few folders), and I make extra copies of specific material (my photo collection, for instance) on different hard drives. It kind of works, and it’s better than backing things up on DVD, but it still feels flaky.

Optical media is the worst. It is cheap, but the limited size of each disc (4.4 GB) calls for voodoo rituals when trying to back up something bigger than that, not to mention having to go through the same thing in reverse when the time comes to pull it out again. Moreover, when the first CD-Rs came out, the manufacturers said that they would last decades. It never happened. Of course, quality differs, but I have had allegedly good discs, namely Verbatim and Sony, die on me after less than three years. When DVD-Rs came out, manufacturers said that these would last centuries. Yet they barely last a decade, unless you keep them in time capsules. The issue is that, unlike printed discs, user-recordable optical media is based upon organic material. As such, it is easily attacked by molds and fungi. I have witnessed with my very eyes the decay of a DVD-R, starting from the outside and slowly — and literally — eating it up towards the center. The solution would be to re-burn everything every 3 or 4 years, but this adds to the expense and is just extremely inconvenient, not to mention that it takes up a lot of space, in the most physical sense of the term.

Hard drives are a better solution: a much higher density (which cynics would define as the ability to lose more data at once), and generally, with today’s technology, a much higher reliability. Yet I have had drives die on me just because the power went out at the wrong time, or simply out of the blue. The click of death is a nightmare to me, and while cryogenic therapy can help sometimes, it’s not guaranteed. It also seems, from my empirical experience, that hard drives paradoxically last longer if they are used on a daily basis. Keep a disk off for a few years, and it may just never work again.

While having an array of hard disks works, it’s still not the best way to handle backups. However, a distinction should be made between backups and storage. The two concepts often overlap, but they are fundamentally different. A backup is a safety copy, something that you need to be able to recover should the main copy become inaccessible. Storage is for material that you put aside and that you may never need again. In other words, the main copy of a backup set is always available, but there is effectively no main copy of things stored away.

USB hard drives are a good solution for both, but they have one drawback: as you need more space, you start collecting power bricks and using up USB ports, leading to the purchase of USB hubs to connect to one another in a waterfall fashion. All of this adds extra risks: what if one hub dies and takes anything connected to it, both directly and indirectly, with it? USB enclosures are a better way to handle this, since you only have one or two of them and swap the disks inside. This procedure usually takes some time and involves dealing with small screws.

USB docks come to the rescue: they serve a purpose very similar to USB enclosures, but they are vertical and take disks vertically, much like a toaster. It’s a breeze to switch disks like that.

A common solution for storage, especially if more than one machine is used in a given household or office, is NAS, or Network Attached Storage. At its minimum, it’s a very basic computer with one hard drive and an Ethernet port, providing access to the former through common protocols such as SMB/CIFS, AFP or NFS. The Linksys NSLU2 is a very small device with a slow CPU (ARM5 at 266 MHz) and little memory (32 MB), and takes up to two USB hard drives. A whole set of unofficial firmwares add extra capabilities, but with so little power and with the forced use of USB, it’s still quite limited.

More current self-enclosed NAS boxes, such as the Netgear ReadyNAS family, have two or more slots. This is when things become interesting, because RAID gets in the picture. I’m not going to discuss RAID here, so please head over to Wikipedia to learn more if you’re not familiar with the matter.

Two-slot devices usually support three levels of RAID: 0, 1 and JBOD. Since we’re talking reliability, RAID-1 is nice. With two 1-terabyte disks, you get 1 TB of space (50% waste) with potential for either drive to fail while the other retains the data. Not bad. In any case, two-slot NAS boxes can be found for as cheap as €100, with better versions starting at €150 or so. Note that I’m using the prices for Italy. The disks are not included, so with two 1-TB drives (each priced €60), the total price is €270. With only one terabyte of usable space, and this means €0.26/GB, with no real ability to expand beyond replacing both disks with bigger units and keeping the 50% waste.

Four-slot units belong to another level, and mostly targeted at SOHO users. They are priced accordingly (hardly anything below €320, diskless) but support RAID-5. This is where things get hot. Four 1-terabyte disks yield about 3 TB of usable space (25% waste), and any one disk can die at a given time. This is nice. The total price of a fully loaded NAS would be at least €560, with a cost per gigabyte of €0.18.

An alternative is to use an actual computer to do all of that. There are operating systems specifically developed for that, such as FreeNAS (based upon FreeBSD), which is so power-conscious that you can install it on a 32 MB (yes, thirty-two megabytes) Compact Flash card, and run it off there. Or you can boot it off a USB stick, or even the CD itself (saving the configuration on a USB stick, which is useful if the machine is old and doesn’t boot off USB at all.) It also supports ZFS, which is extremely neat.

Now, I currently have an old machine that I frankensteinized from different sources. It’s running FreeBSD 8.1 at the moment, and it mostly serves as a download central. The specs are low, really low: AMD Duron 750 MHz, 512 MB PC100 RAM (some of which is defective according to Memtest86+, but I haven’t had any problems in actual usage so far), 120 GB IDE hard drive. It is not really suited for number crunching, and sometimes it’s often faster to download things off Usenet than it is to repair and unpack them. This kind of worries me about using RAID-5, and ZFS-based RAID-Z is definitely out of the picture (the recommended minimum is a 64-bit CPU and 2 GB of RAM.) The good news is that I installed a two-port PCI SATA controller I had lying around and FreeBSD recognized it immediately, so I could easily hook up a couple of SATA drives to it and use RAID-1, which I suppose is better than nothing. I could do that with the current FreeBSD setup, or I could get a €5 CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter and finally put those extra-small cards I’ve had for years to good use with FreeNAS. I would effectively just need to get two hard drives, and that would let me sail by for a while.

The best thing would of course building a dedicated new machine, powerful enough to handle RAID-Z (either with FreeNAS or with FreeBSD.) I toyed around with the idea last night while browsing a website that I have some discounts at. A decent machine, coupled with a couple of 1-TB disks, would set me back about €360. It’s the same as a four-slot NAS box, but with two disks included for the price and the ability to grow over time. However, I have concerns about energy consumption — embedded devices are always less demanding that general-purpose machines — and, in all honesty, having such a thing to run FreeNAS, which is somewhat “castrated,” feels a little bit overkill. Of course, while RAID-5 seems to be a bit tricky on FreeBSD as it requires non-official kernel patches, RAID-Z is supported out of the box and should do fine.

All in all, the cheapest intermediate solution would be probably purchasing two disks and the CF-IDE adapter, and mirror them using FreeNAS. Another good thing would be finding some PC100/PC133 memory of a decent size, say a couple of 512 MB sticks. Then, as needs grows and as money allows, I may switch to a dedicated file server brand-new machine, with two more disks and RAID-Z.

All of this, of course, whilst keeping in mind that RAID is not a backup solution in itself, and only offers protection against drive failure. User-driven deletions are, well, as catastrophic as they’ve ever been.

Everything is great on paper, but falls short in practice. The reason? It’s slow. Really, really slow. And this is not just about my Samsung player, because the PS3 did the very same thing. Something is inherently wrong with BD-J. Certainly processing power is not lacking: decoding a 50-megabit stream in full high definition takes a whole lot of CPU. Can’t such big processors handle the new menus? And it’s not a problem with the network either: if 8 megabits aren’t enough for the menus, I don’t know what it is.

While the disc menus are still acceptable, BD Live in particular is unbelievably slow. It takes time to download the content, and that’s surprising considering how limited the interface is. I don’t know exactly how it’s developed, but a website with a similar interface would be measured in the tens (or hundreds at most) of kilobytes. Why the same thing has to take so much through BD-J is beyond me. Perhaps the bytecode is huge? (Or maybe Java sucks? Hmm… tough one there.) And then again, why is navigating the finally-at-last-downloaded interface such a pain? You press a button, and it takes well over a second to register. Again: this also applied to the PS3, so it’s not exclusive to my relatively low-end player, which incidentally also has “Internet applications,” and they are just as slow. Probably it’s just local BD-J stuff.

Oh, and as a side note: my parents’ Blu-ray player has no internal memory. Mine has 64 MB — megabytes — of flash. On the other hand, my ebook reader has a solid gigabyte. Why not toss in a little bit more so that users are not forced to use USB thumb drives to access online content? Perhaps they want to make it harder for users to notice how slow BD-J is?